The two Indonesias and the two Americas

Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] battalion was at the center of massacre and torture operations in the 1960s as in the 1990s. Its chief then, Sarwo Edhie, has been called a CIA agent or contact. It was he who, while giving orders in Indonesia for the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party, used the American Army word, ‘psywar.’ ‘The […]

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

Book cover
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2   If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more

Ronald Gray (1920-2008)

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

Ronald Gray, founder and owner of The Hammersmith Bookshop (1948-1963) and Hammersmith Books (1963-2000) died on 30 May at the age of 87. He was a most remarkable person, with a passionate interest in everything relating to politics and to recent history. He developed the vast stock of out-of-print books in Hammersmith Books to reflect … Read more

George Orwell and the IRD

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell’s decision to collaborate with that organisation’s anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that ‘George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he … Read more

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] of a President. HOSTY, James P., Jr. (with Thomas Hosty). Assignment: Oswald. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996. viii + 328 pps. Illustrated, index. Hosty, the Dallas FBI agent who destroyed a note from Lee Harvey Oswald on the orders of SAG Gordon Shanklin, here tells his story. Few surprises, good on FBI procedure and […]

Lundy, and, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] for profit. In this hothouse atmosphere paranoia develops and conspiracies are everywhere, often inspired by supposed colleagues. Just as James Angleton was accused of being a KGB agent because of his overly close relationship to Golitsyn, so Lundy was smeared because of his working relationship with Garner. It is not a game for innocents […]

The once and future king?

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] to the GLC in Croydon North East in March 1980. He was later a Labour councillor in Islington in 1982-1986 and thereafter for many years an election agent and researcher for Jeremy Corbyn MP. An accurate monograph of his political activity and connections would make interesting reading. He has a particular interest in Kurdish […]

The Real Gemstone File

Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)

[…] Jo’s Necrophiliac Mafia Montini in Rome? Necro Nader? Chappaquiddick Dickie’s handmaiden Graham? 33rd Degree Masons and Papal Knights – a la Alioto’s Swig? J. Mafia Hoover’s Ex-FBI agent group, featuring Maheu, the assassin at Dallas, Memphis & L.A.?’ Page 187 constitutes the masterpiece of the Gemstone File. Words cannot adequately describe its unsettling aura […]

Western Goals: LA Police Settle For $1.8 million

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

[…] LAPD had set up the Public Disorder and Intelligence Division and the Criminal Conspiracy Section (PDID and CCS) in the 1960s. In 1971 one of the CCS agent provocateurs, Louis Tackwood (a black), began exposing their activities. Tackwood later wrote a book, a fairly extraordinary book called The Glasshouse Tapes (Avon NY 1973) describing […]

Accessibility Toolbar